Isaiah 66:10-14c ‘Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river’
Galatians 6.14-18
‘I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.’
Luke
10.1-9 ‘Your peace will rest on him’
‘The
kingdom of God has come near to you.’
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Today’s gospel reading is full of movement, challenge
and commission.
It reminds us that being a Christian is not something
just done in church, but involves being sent out: ‘go, in the peace of Christ’
as is said at the conclusion of the Eucharist.
Sent out to do something and be something.
Sent out to seek out and notice the Kingdom of God
and, bringing healing, declare to people that ‘The kingdom of God has come near
to you.’
In the preceding chapter of St Luke’s Gospel, Jesus
has been talking to the Twelve.
Now he sends out ahead of him seventy-two others in
pairs with a commission to get out into the harvest.
This reminds us that Jesus had way more than twelve disciples.
It tells us that there is much to harvest out in the
world: the seeds of the Kingdom are ready, people are ripe for Christ: get out
and bring them in to Christ!
In some ancient manuscripts of the Gospel the
seventy-two are referred to as the seventy.
It’s not a significant discrepancy, and the number seventy
evokes Moses being told to choose seventy men to be elders for the people of
Israel.
And the LORD says that they will be given some of
the Spirit given to Moses to equip them for their task. (Numbers 11:16-25)
What we see here, in the commission of the seventy
or seventy-two, is disciples becoming apostles.
The disciple follows; the apostle is sent: ‘come,
follow me’ (Matthew 16:24, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23); ‘go, in the peace of Christ.’
These disciples, now apostles, they are sent out to
harvest.
You are one of the seventy-two today: a disciple become
apostle, bearing the apostolic faith of the Church to the world.
Classically you go out to harvest with a scythe or, nowadays,
a combine harvester.
What are the apostles sent out with, so that they
can harvest?
Nothing!
‘Carry no moneybag, no knapsack, no sandals, and
greet no one on the road’. (v4)
So, they go out onto the road barefoot, skint, no snacks
in their bag, told to be so single minded in their mission that they don’t get
caught up in the small talk of greeting people as they go.
That’s why Jesus says they are ‘lambs sent in the
midst of wolves’ (v3)
What does a lamb bring in the midst of wolves, other
than being a delicious meal?
The lamb goes in innocency, vulnerability and
sacrificially into an arena of hostility, threat and peril.
St Peter captures this sense when he says, ‘Your
adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to
devour’ (1 Peter 5.8).
Lion or a wolf: the threat level to a lamb is the
same.
Peter goes on to say:
Resist him, firm in
your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by
your brotherhood throughout the world. (1 Peter 5.8)
And how true that is.
According to the House of Commons Library, Christians
in North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, and Yemen are under severe persecution.
There have been recent fatal attacks on churches in
Syria.
Lambs – our brothers and sisters in Christ - are in
the midst of wolves today, and still, like us, commissioned to find the seeds
of the Kingdom of God and to call people to God’s love and presence.
Our own witness as Christians is challenging in a culture
that increasingly moves away from its Christian roots and takes Christian
values of love, care and compassion and distorts them and sees them mutate.
It is so easy to dilute the faith received from the apostles;
to consign Biblical principles to being out of date; to dismiss Christian
teaching as out of touch.
The bearers of the Gospel of peace have always been
persecuted, ridiculed and even killed by a world where the wolves of
anti-Christ lurk.
Rather than lament the presence of wolves we have to
have the courage of lambs, the courage of the lambs persecuted around the
world, courage from the Lamb of God who went to the Cross to face down and
defeat the powers of this world and the cosmic powers.
It is the power of the Lamb of God that is seen in
the cross, the place of sacrifice for the life of the world.
It is this sign that St Paul, in our second reading,
says is the one thing he will boast about (Galatians 6.14).
So, we are lambs sent in the midst of wolves,
carrying nothing with us except the peace, the shalom, of God and, in our
bodies, the sign of the cross.
We take no worldly achievements or recognition, but
the self-emptying love of Christ.
We go to bring healing and reconciliation in the
name of Jesus, to find and declare that the Kingdom of God has come near.
As disciples we hear Jesus’ word and we draw on his
life and, as apostles, this word and life is lived in our day to day lives.
And it is to be proclaimed and taken out.
Can you give an account of your faith to those closest
to you? Can you give an account of your faith to friends? Can you give an
account of your faith to those you don’t even know? Are you ready to be one of
the seventy-two?
Before we go as apostles, those sent out, we also
need to be disciples, drawing on the life, presence and teaching of Jesus; to
be men and women of prayer, dependent not on our wallet, what we carry with us,
or what is on our feet, but dependent only on Christ, Lamb of God and Prince of
Peace.
As ‘the seventy-two’ of our day let’s join the flow
described in Isaiah:
I will extend peace to
Jerusalem like a river, and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream.
(Isaiah 66.12)
